Gray Skies and Dirty Birds
Filming a ‘paint video’ as she works.
Smoke from the California wildfires not only cancelled school today, it kept a very disappointed girl penned up inside when she would have rather gone out to the park or ride around on her scooter. As a special treat, we went to our neighborhood diner and she got pancakes for breakfast. Then it was back home, where she got to watch some extra cartoons. But I didn’t want the whole day to be just television, so I broke out something I’d found in the clearance section at IKEA a couple weeks back—a pair of plaster bird statues. Then we pulled out our bin of paints and went to work.
We worked on the statues on and off over the course of the day, as she filmed ‘paint videos’ that were an homage to her favorite YouTube channel, Paint By Monster. We took breaks for snacks, cartoons, and almost literally bouncing off the walls, but we both kept returning to the table, adding another layer of color here, or a few more dabs of paint there. “These look like birds that could be from Kabos,” I said—and by later afternoon there was, of course, a Monstervore story attached to them.
She had been coming up with a lot of monsters, so I suggested that these might be heroes of some sort. We already had the crow spies of the Crowguard and their treehouses—but no, she said, these aren’t “sneakers” because they have bright colors. We decided that the crest on my bird was actually a helmet, and that my bird was General Graay, leader of the Cloudguard.
Hers is Malaka, one of the Cloudguard’s “Dirty Birds”. The dots all over her are a mix of berry juice and monster blood that helps protect them from lightning and dragon fire. This seems useful, as the Cloudguard’s job is to keep the skies clear of dragons and other dangerous flying monsters—in particular the Lightning Girls and their rainbugs when they come down from the Salt Clouds. She told me that Graay’s helmet is actually a broken dragon tooth from a metal dragon that tried to eat him, and he broke out through the teeth. I told her that I wanted to hear more about that story. She told me that she wanted a snack, and we haven’t gotten back to that tale yet. Maybe someday.
General Graay and Malaka on display.
When we were done she asked if we could trade birds. She would take hers to my office, if I would put hers in her room. She was thrilled when I offered to put both birds by her bed. Me, I was just happy that when she thinks back on they day there’s the chance that instead of remembering being cooped up she might think of spending the day in her imagination, soaring among the clouds in a blue sky.
Painting together!
